Most people who know anything about SEO understand that links to your site from other websites is crucial to good search engine rankings and good traffic.  What many forget is that Google also counts your internal links.  A really large site can generate good page rank for the home page simply by including a link to that home page on every internal page.  The more external links you have to a given page the more link “juice” that page can pass on to the home page or a money page.

Internal Linking: DO FOLLOW vs. NOFOLLOW

Every new page on the internet gets a little link “juice” when Google finds it.  You gain link “juice” for a page when a DOFOLLOW link to that page is created – internal or external to your site.  Links with the NOFOLLOW tag added are far less useful from an SEO standpoint – they mainly help in getting your site crawled more often or getting a specific page crawled at all.

Your internal linking strategy should be one where you focus your DOFOLLOW links on your money pages and your home page.  Sometimes it is also good to focus DOFOLLOW links on category pages (pages that contain some text and a listing of all the products in a given category).

When you create links to your Privacy Policy, Contact Us, or Disclaimer pages you should always do so with the NOFOLLOW tag.  There’s no need to waste link “juice” on these pages.  You have no use for users finding those pages at the top of search engine results.

Internal Linking: Anchor Text

Remember that sales are about user experience and not about Google.  However, you can help Google get interested people to the right page with keyword targeted page content that is internally linked to with the correct keyword or keyword phrase.  Google can’t guess at what a given page is all about.  Google uses the anchor text people assign to a given link to help determine what a given page is about.

If you are unfamiliar with Anchor Text it is the text that shows up when you place a link in your blog post or other web page.  (Typically the Anchor Text shows up as blue text with an underline.)  When a link is created in HTML the code looks like this:

<a href=”http://YOUR-DOMAIN.com/KEYWORD-PHRASE.html”>KEYWORD PHRASE ANCHOR TEXT</a>

You should try to name your pages with the keyword the page is targeting in the name that way your primary keyword phrase appears in your URL.  Good for SEO.  Now when you link to your page you should always use an anchor text based on the primary keyword or a variation of it.  (You don’t want all of the links to have identical anchor text.)

Dos:

1. use descriptive text – anchor text should provide at least a basic idea of what the page linked to will contain
2. use concise anchor text – short but descriptive text (generally 5 or fewer words)
3. format links so they’re easy to spot – make it easy for users to distinguish between regular text and the anchor text of your links

Don’ts:

1. don’t use generic anchor text like “page”, “article”, or “click here”
2. don’t use text that has no relation to the page the user will visit from that link
3. don’t use the page’s URL as the anchor text
4. don’t write long anchor text (remember short phrases)
5. don’t use CSS or text styling that hides links (this can get you Google slapped if you get caught)

don’t create unnecessary links that don’t help with the user’s navigation of the site